On Etruscan Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

light was clear but strangely pale, like when you open your eyes under water in a swimming pool.
    Everyone was looking in the same direction, toward a brightly colored building that looked vaguely familiar to Hector as he turned to see what they were all staring at. It was larger than the other structures around it. Nobody was talking. Even the babies and small children were still.
    Why were they all focused so intently? Hector screwed up his eyes and followed their gaze. The building looked kind of like the temples pictured in books on ancient Greece and Rome. A short flight of steps led up to a row of columns, which supported a peaked roof. A carved face with its tongue sticking out gazed with crossed eyes over the crowd from the point of the roof, and animals that looked like a mix between eagles and cats perched on the corners. Hector could just barely make out a closed door behind the row of columns, but it was in such deep shadow under the overhang that he couldn’t see any of its details.
    Unlike pictures of the old temples, all the different parts of this building were painted. The columns were blue and red, the details of the animals and the carved face were picked out in many colors, their edges outlined in black. It was so colorful that it almost hurt Hector’s eyes in the unnatural light.
    People were beginning to mutter and shift their weight from foot to foot, as though they were becoming impatient. A baby started to cry and was hushed.
    Still, they all stared at the colorful building. The tension grew until Hector would have sworn he saw electric sparks shooting around the crowd.
    And then the temple door burst open.
    *   *   *
    Hector sat bolt upright, his throat closed tight in panic. Had he screamed? He settled back against the bumpy tree, his heart pounding, and tried to steady his breath. Despite the bright sun, he felt a chill that started deep in his bones. He wished he’d stayed asleep just a little longer. He hadn’t seen what was coming through the door, but whatever it was, it would have been better to see it than to wake up not knowing.
    The strange eye-shaped rock was still in his hand. He stared at it and shuddered.
    â€œDid you find something?”
    It was Ettore. Mutely, Hector held out the eye. As Ettore took it from him, Hector warmed, as though a hidden sun had come out again. And he felt something else too. He had that odd sensation of having lived through all this before. What did his dad call it? Déjà vu.
    â€œGreek,” Ettore said. “Modern.”
    â€œHow do you know it’s not ancient?”
    Ettore rolled the eye over in his hand. “It wasn’t deep enough in the dirt,” he said. “The Etruscan things are farther down. And anyway, the city seems to stop back there,” and he pointed toward the trenches. Hector barely listened. The feeling of déjà vu was slipping away, and the more he tried to hold on to it, the faster it fled. He shook his head and blinked.
    Ettore had evidently finished talking while Hector was feeling time slide around, because the man handed the stone back to him and squatted by the place where Hector had been digging. Hector held the odd thing, considering whether to throw it far away, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he slid it into his pocket and stood up.
    Ettore was inspecting the small hole where Hector had found the stone.
    â€œGood work,” he said. “You didn’t disturb anything more than what you had to. What made you dig it up, anyway?”
    Hector didn’t want to say he’d seen it shining. That must have been a trick of the light. So he just said, “It looked too round to be a regular rock.” He hoped that Ettore wouldn’t be angry with him for not calling him when he found “something interesting,” but the archaeologist didn’t seem to care. Maybe it was because he had already decided that the